A (0:00)

How do the top 0.1% actually invest their money? Most people think they prioritize stocks and real estate, but that's completely wrong. I bought my first stock at 19, a rental property when I was 21. I was voted number one angel investor in all of Canada. I've even invested in companies alongside founders of Google and even Jay Z. And here's what I've learned. The top 0.1% follow a completely different strategy than you think. I'm going to break down the four stages of how the wealthy actually invest their money. Even if you're starting from scratch, welcome to the Martel Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best selling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. My best selling book Buy back. Your time is out now. Grab a copy@buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers. Stage 1 Invest in your foundation. The best thing you can do is invest in getting ready to receive. This is a non negotiable. First off, we need to prioritize your health, essentially your mental and your physical because that's the baseline. Once you get rich, the only thing you care about is that you feel good about yourself having that money. If you're healthy, you have a thousand goals and dreams. If you're unhealthy and sick in the hospital, you've got one goal. So we have to prioritize our fitness, our our sleep and our nutrition. All of those will impact your brain. My best investment is in me because I will take me with me for the rest of my life. You want to make sure you this body, this vehicle is dialed in. Here's a great hack. Go to an expensive gym. Pay. When you pay, you pay attention. You prioritize. The best part is if you go to that expensive gym, you'll also be there with other people that got money. See, cheap people don't go to expensive gyms. If you want to elevate your life, get around other people, other CEOs, entrepreneurs and folks can actually support your dreams. Pay to get access to the best gym and be sure to say hello to people. But that's just the baseline. The next stage is where you'll see things start to turn for you financially, which is stage number two. Invest in your skills and your knowledge. The best investments. The best ROI is to just buy better thinking. Pay to get access to learn things. Pay for the blueprint pay for the answer on the test. Pay to have somebody that spent 20 years learning a topic to give you everything they've learned in a compressed format that will sharpen your skills, to make you more valuable, to get paid more and then once you pay to get access to those teachers, turn those teachers into relationships. My 12 year old son the other day bought his first digital course. He realized that for him to become more valuable, he has to pay people to teach them things. So he doesn't spend all this time trying to do research, make maybe finding the answers that he's looking for. You got to find the people that have the courses. Maybe they'll tell you what tools of the trade to use so you can save yourself all this research. My top two investments, coaches and books I've studied and I use that language specifically. Over 1600 business books integrated them into my life. I've taught them to other people so I could really understand them. Coaches are some of the most powerful ways for you to upgrade your skills to make investments in yourself. Because oftentimes we get coaches to help us with the transformation. Guess what? The the transformation happens at the transaction. I turn my teachers into mentors. Most of the authors who are still alive that wrote the books that impacted my life the most, I've emailed. Would you be surprised to find out that most of them write back? Many of them I've met in real life now, all because I decided to take the knowledge they shared with me, acknowledge that, tell it how it impacted my life. And it turns out if somebody's taken 25 years of their experience, put it into a book, sold it for 20 bucks, and, and somebody emails, messages them to let them know how it impacted their life. They appreciate that most people won't make this decision because they can't see the roi, but it's because they're not learning the right things. I call it just in time versus just in case. Most people learn just in case they need it. That's like going to university. I read books for things I need to solve in my Life. Today, almost 20 years ago, I read a book called Never Eat Alone by a guy named Keith Farazi. I was an introverted software programmer. I didn't want to talk to people, but I knew I had to learn how to network. So I read his book and he taught me these crazy strategies like you should use meals to connect with people. You should invite people to work out with you. Your network is your net worth. Turns out wildly right? If you look at my life today, I don't meet with people new without bringing them for a workout. I do it on a founder's hike. I do it on a run. I've done it on the back of my boat. Like that's just my rule. I even emailed Keith and kept in touch with them. And almost a decade later I meet up with him in la and true to his character and what he wrote about in the book, he invited me for a workout and then for brunch to meet some of his friends. When you invest in your skills and your knowledge through coaching courses or any other format like books, then you become more valuable. And here's the best part. Investments don't always require cash. Most authors, including myself, usually have a newsletter where they share strategies. Like mine is the Martell Method, where I teach you my top mindset, entrepreneurship and growth tactics. If you want that, just click the L below in the description and join the community. It costs nothing. If you're still stuck on this point, I want you to consider this. If I already knew what I needed to know to be successful, then the success would already be in my life. The fact that it's not means I have to go learn, develop my skills, develop my habits, develop my mindset so I can become the person who can easily bring those outcomes into my life. You got to keep investing. So here are some very tactical ways that you can go about investing in your skills and knowledge. The first one is build what I call a Centurion Council. Essentially, it's a hundred mentors list. I like to make it 25 authors, 25 operators. These are people actually running companies, 25 coaches, people that teach people, and then 25 peers, folks that are one or two years ahead of where you want to be. Once you do that, read everything about them. Read their books, watch their content, test their methods. See if it works for you. I call that bathing in the waterfall of their knowledge. Once you've done that and you've gotten some value from them, then I want you to reach out to connect or hire them. But you got to use the pack script. P is open with proof you've used their content. Tell them, hey, I read this thing. You taught me this. I did that. It had this impact on my life. That's the proof that you read it. The A stands for ask. Ask one specific tight question. C is close. If you ask somebody for seven minutes, you might go 10. But close the call. Wrap it up. It also shows that you're busy doing things, not just a talker. And trust me, if someone gets approached by a lot of people wanting my advice, knowing that I've been helpful and they moved on, and then they can message me later. The impact that's how we start to build a relationship. Once you do this and make it a habit, we can move on to the next stage to invest your money like the top 0.1% before we get back to the episode. If you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com Stage 3 Investing in your business the top 0.1% they don't guess. They buy speed and they reinvest in the machine that multiplies cash. And for those people, it's their business. But there's different ways to look at investing in your business. The first thing I'm going to tell you is you got to look at the gear. I can't tell you how often I'm with a friend and he's pulling up his phone and the phone is slow or his computer's crashing and I'm like, bro, there's only a handful of places you spend a lot of time you want to invest in that. Spending money on gear is the fastest, quickest way to get a return on your capital. It's like being a roofer and manually nailing all the roof shingles to the roof when you could buy a nail gun and get like literally 10 times more productivity. The other one is blueprints or playbooks. Like I mentioned, paying for shortcuts instead of trial and error is a pro move. All the richest people do this every day. They pay for consultants. They pay for mentorship. They will pay anybody for an hour of their time. I'm on Instagram all the time messaging all of you or chatting with people or trying to find new people to follow. And if I see somebody sharing something really cool, my go to is, hey, what would an hour of your time cost? Most of them look at my profile and go, well, I think it'd be a fun conversation. How about free? I'm like, sounds good to me. Sometimes they'll go 30 grand. Guess what? For the right person, 30 grand for an hour of their time so I can learn everything that they've learned in the last 20 years is the best investment I could make to unblock an area of my life. Another one is coaches and consultants. And yes, we talked about this in skills and knowledge. But this is way different because now we're talking about the business. See, most entrepreneurs will hire coaches or consultants for themselves. I'm talking about hiring more specialized people for the departments, for the people leading their department. So that you get the right person inside the company helping develop the people. Because when you build the people, the people build the business. Too often, all the knowledge and information is bottlenecked by the CEO. Push it down to the people that are doing the work. My favorite recent example of this is helping my creative director create a mastermind of incredible people that were also creative directors or video editors or people creating content that he could learn from. Both provide value sharing with them and them providing value back with their lessons learned. Masterminds is a powerful strategy that I think that every CEO should ask their leaders to build for themselves. Proximity equals acceleration. What's crazy is for seven years I tried to build a business. Two companies, back to back failed. It wasn't until I hired a business coach, his name was Bob, to teach me business. And I know it's like, I'm an entrepreneur. I know business. Guess what? Turned out I didn't understand how to actually do the business stuff. I was good at writing code. I could build Software. That's like 10% of the overall business. In the first year, Bob mentored me and coached me to do almost a million dollars in revenue. That was wild. Two failed companies over seven years in the first 12 months, almost a million in revenue. The power of people giving you the blueprint so you don't have to sit there and figure it out yourself is a massive investment. Some people are stuck wanting to learn everything themselves. That's slow. All these are examples of, like, outside help. But guess what? Inside your business, you can learn to buy back your time making investments in bringing people in to take time out of your calendar so you don't become a slave to your own business, so that you can re energize and invest your mind and your talent in the thing that makes you the most money. That lights you up. That is the ultimate investment. This is the buyback principle. You don't hire people to grow your business. You hire people to buy back your time. So here's a framework that I use to reinvest in my business. First off, every quarter, I want you to set Aside a fixed percent of profit, let's say 20 or 30%, that you earmarked for reinvestment. Then you have to redeploy that capital into the most leveraged category of opportunities. Then you take that capital and you reinvest it in either marketing, sales, or delivery, unblocking where the constraint is in the business. If that means you got to pay for other people's playbooks, you might need to hire a person to lead it. You might have to build some systems, or you just have to grow the team or build more capacity in that area of the business. But the theory of constraint TOC is the right way to analyze where you should be reinvesting. And finally, don't let your cash pile up just in case. A lot of people hear, oh, you should have eight months of cash in your bank account, just in case. Move it to your holding company, leave it there, invest it out of there. And guess what? If you need it back, you liquidate it and you invest it in the business. That strategy of taking the cash out and keeping that as an investment forces the business to grow. The other thing about investing in your business is most entrepreneurs will get a 50% return on their investment in their business than taking the money investing in other places. And everybody's like, oh, I got to invest in the index funds, I got invested in the market. I got to invest in private equity. I'm an angel investor. Guess what? Not a good move. So you've built the foundation, leveled up your skills, and reinvested in your business. Only after doing all that is when you start looking at other financial assets. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Stage four, investing in financial assets. As I said at the beginning, most people make their investments backwards with stocks, index funds, real estate, all that stuff. But the truth is these don't make you rich. They keep you rich. That's why the 0.1% treat financial assets as the last stage, not the first. If you look at 90% of the people that have become really rich, I'm talking like 100 million plus. They made it by having a primary operating company that generated cash. They took that extra cash and then they started doing what I'm about to share with you. And don't overcomplicate it. You've built, well, this is just a safety net. And one of my mentors, Ken, he said it best. He said making Money, that's easy. Keeping it super hard. This is about keeping it. So now that we're at this stage and you've gone through each one of those, just make sure you don't overcomplicate it. Stocks, S&P, 500, real estate, investment trust, they're all great safe options, but just keep in mind they're for a long term play. Essentially, it gives you peace of mind so you can focus on growing the business. Knowing these assets will compound. I want to take the risk in my primary business, where I have an unfair advantage, not in my investments. Here's what not to do. Late 20s, I get an opportunity to invest in homes. This was during the great financial crisis and banks were trying to sell and liquidate anything on their balance sheet as fast as possible. So you could buy homes, for example, in Detroit for $8,000. And I bought a ton. I thought I was smart, I thought I was a real estate guy. And all of a sudden I find out the homes I buy are essentially were rotten and not livable. And there was homeless people in them and I should have never got involved them in the first place. That's when I realized I got to stick to what I know best, software. If your primary business is real estate, go nuts. It's not mine. Whatever you're best at, do that. If money is just sitting on the sidelines, not working, it's just wasted. I consider dollars as little workers and they need to be put to work. Here's the best part. You can actually leverage your liquid assets, these investments I'm going to talk about, to buy things without paying taxes. Essentially, rich people that have stock in their primary business, think Elon Musk with all his equity tied up in Tesla. He can use that stock to borrow money, essentially a loan backed by the stock, not pay any taxes because it's a loan, and then just take out an insurance policy to pay back the loan if he dies. It's called the buy, borrow, die strategy and a lot of people use it. The first part is you have to buy. That's why rich people buy stocks and they never sell them. They literally say, this is a portion of my portfolio that I'm never going to sell. I'm going to own them forever. And oftentimes they'll put them in a family trust so it can be transferred in a more tax efficient way to future generations. Second is they borrow money from the bank using that portfolio, that stock as collateral. Again, borrow the money. There's no taxes when you borrow money. So they can pay for Personal assets. And then third is when they die, the life insurance pays back the bank for the money they borrowed that was secured against the stock. So the stock never has to sell, so it doesn't trigger any capital gains, which means they don't have to pay taxes. Their kids get the stock tax free at today's value. This is very technical, but understand this. Step one, go get money. Step two, invest in your health. Step three, invest in your knowledge. Step four, invest in your business. Then five, do this stuff. The real question that I get asked all the time is what percentage of my income should I be investing in? What? First off, put some aside long term if you want to like lock in into index funds and just have really tax efficient, low fee type of investing just so that you start to build the base again that you can use as leverage and collateral for your first home, for a business loan, whatever it is, you least have that there. I'm not saying you're going to get rich off of it by any means, but at least you'll build a foundation and stay. Savers are growers. So you need to learn how to save. Invest a percentage, call it 10% is a good amount. I like to give to charity because I think you get what you want for other people. So if I want to give my money to people that need it most, I'm going to get more. So I think giving tithing 10%, smart strategy. Then the other one is what percent do you think you should reinvest in yourself? The other day I was talking to one of my sales guys. He makes 35,000amonth. He's 20. He's never made that much money in his life. He goes, Look, I put 5,000 in stock. I've got this great apartment, I got a great car, I got a great life. But I still have extra money. What should I do with it? I said, tell me how you've invested in yourself. Did you hire a coach? Did you buy a course? What books are you reading? What seminars are you planning on going to? He didn't have an answer for that. My rule is if you have capital, invest in you and then you invest in your team and then you invest around people around you so everybody gets better. You have to invest in you to be that person. It's not about having it. So here's my question for you. Out of everything I shared, doesn't matter if you have no money or you have a lot of money, what's the one thing that you're going to make a commitment to? Is it deciding to put your health first. Realizing that being rich and not being healthy is a bad proposition? Is it? Deciding maybe you're 35 and you haven't invested in a stock because you put it off? Someday, maybe. Whatever it is, I want you to make a commitment today to start anything to be a better investor. Because the more you learn how to invest, the better your returns are going to get. The better those returns get, the more you're going to have. And remember, if you want to learn more from me, just click the link below and subscribe to my newsletter. Every week I send out three emails to teach you how to upgrade your mindset, your skills, all for free, no cost. So even if you have no money to invest, that's the best way for you to start. Thanks for listening to Martel Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom and build their empire.